Jeff Dufour

Jeff Dufour is a D.C.–based journalist who covers cocktails and spirits when he's not covering politics. He prefers rye, and he believes that a full ounce of lemon juice is almost always too much. Follow him at @dcdufour.

When discussing a bottle of booze like Courvoisier’s L’Essence, one must, almost out of necessity, begin with matters like its scarcity and its cost. So let’s just get that out of the way: the legendary cognac house releases only about…

Usually when you’re talking amari, you’re talking about recipes handed down over the course of generations by Italians. Seattle-based BroVo’s line of amari is almost the polar opposite. The liqueur-centric distillery had been working on a rhubarb spirit. When they…

I’m old enough to remember a day when if you wanted a hot pepper-infused tequila, you had to infuse the damn tequila with the damn peppers yourself. Oh, the burden. Now, any liquor store worth it’s… well, it’s liquor, likely…

On paper at least, the Last Word cocktail is a drink that has no business succeeding. But there’s something about the way the funky sweetness of maraschino plays off the tang of the lime, the herbal hit of the chartreuse…

Colorado-based Leopold Bros. distillery is something of a trailblazer in the world of gin. Their American small batch gin, originally released in 2001, was at the leading edge of the “American gin” movement, eschewing the juniper-forward style of London dry…

Boulard is one of the legacy producers of Calvados, distilling from cider in the Normandy region of France since 1825. The Boulard Calvados Pays d’Auge VSOP, one notch up from their entry level, is a blend of brandies–each aged for…